Culinary Catastrophes: readers Share Their Most Disastrous Cooking Attempts
A collection of home cooks recount spectacularly failed meals, ranging from a mole sauce sabotaged by milk chocolate to a risotto drowned in wine, offering cautionary tales and humorous anecdotes of kitchen mishaps. The Guardian invited readers to share their worst cooking experiences, resulting in a compilation of culinary disasters that highlight the risks – and occasional hilarity – of venturing into the kitchen.
Barty, a 29-year-old carpenter from Bristol, experienced a particularly unsettling outcome while attempting Mexican mole. “I was making Mexican mole, a appetizing mixture of many ingredients including dark chocolate… I couldn’t find any so I bought milk chocolate. What could possibly go wrong? Well, everything. it was awful!” He attempted to salvage the dish by adding it to a cake mix, but the result was inedible. ”My friend was nearly sick and it ended up in the kitchen bin. Don’t ever use milk chocolate in mole, and never use bad mole in a cake!”
Adrian Keith Burton, currently residing in Spain, faced a similar fate with a gravy-based dessert. “I was attempting to make a trifle, and decided to use gravy instead of custard. It was…concerning and was aptly christened Seagull Pie.”
Cathal McGuinness,26,a civil servant from Dublin,Ireland,created what he termed the “ethanol risotto” after liberally adding wine to a gruyere risotto while under the influence. “I started cooking this after having had a few beers… I proceeded to pour in a whole bottle of wine… After three bottles of white wine and heaps of gruyere, this was starting to smell very funky. Now fresh out of white wine… I poured a bottle of rosé in.” The resulting dish was so bad,McGuinness ”walked out of my house and cried,” and his friends were unable to eat it.
the Guardian’s community callout continues to solicit contributions from readers, offering a platform for sharing culinary mishaps and lessons learned. Readers can contribute their own stories via the Guardian Community Team’s profile page.
